#cap ucla

Sara Lyons on On The Other Side

The beginning is deceptively gentle: four people appear on stage and stare straight at us. Chatter dissolves, eyes turn forward, and they hold our collective gaze, unflinching, calm, and direct. Audiences never know what to expect at the start of a performance; in this moment, it actually seems like the performers don’t either. One speaks after a long silence: “I don’t want to start.”

These words simultaneously spark and protest the beginning of the show — a dialectic that informs each element of this company’s unraveling of borders. Each performer has lived a life defined by borders between nationalities, citizenships, languages, and gender — now they occupy a space populated only by a few microphones on stands. They slip between documentary and abstraction, intertwining first-person storytelling, re-performance, and movement sequences to inspect “bordered moments” throughout their lives. Theatricality flips to disarming mundanity like a light switch.

The performers tell us that what we are seeing is not the show: it’s what was cut from the show. They wheel invisible panels across the stage with full allegiance to their existence, destabilizing our sense of what is and is not. Avalos describes crossing the Brownsville-Matamoros ‘borderplex’ from one home to another; Assadourian rants about impossible stereotypes she must navigate as an Iranian actress in America; and Outlaw recalls life as a queer, black American in West Berlin before and after the fall of the wall. “We are territorial beings,” says a program note.

Splint is a site-specific director who has worked in public spaces. Now, in a theater, she lays bare the social, economic, and political systems that create and interpret a work alongside artist and audience. America becomes her site, as it lives in our every breath, move, purchase, and turn at the ballot box. She reminds us that empires begin with a simple utterance: who is, and who is not.

Sara Lyons is a Los Angeles-based director, theatre-maker, and teacher focusing on adaptation, social practice, and feminist forms.

Elizabeth Schiffler on On The Other Side

the show began by defining

the space between people

Looking back at the experience, with the space between me-now 

and me-experiencing-the-show growing bigger,

all of those borders and spaces have become stranger… I am new to los angeles theater, new to the city, and privileged in my ease of navigating borders as an american citizen. This was an opportunity to listen and watch those borders that are sticky and violent and unjust and bound, and three-five people who moved through the borders. I learned stories of border crossings and not-crossings, space and not-space, lines and not-lines. 

Yes, I just listed a stream of paradoxes. We seem to live in that world, full of paradoxes, and Marike made messy those borders and lines at each level of this piece, down to the crossings of actor to audience, director to stage, and words crossing each other as the stories told were both clearly autobiographical and clearly not. 

The microphone was a tool for Splint’s (not)borders. As an actor might approach the microphone to share something intimate from their life, such as their ability to speak multiple languages and the ways borders have left them out or on the fringe in America. They might later come to the microphone and speak for another actor, or with another actor, crossing bodies and spaces and the connections between actors were forged through the voice jumping stories, bodies, and space - as the show continued, these instances of crossings multiplied, making messy borders vivid. 

On staging (not)borders: 

looking forward, the borders of theater spaces will continue to change. cancellations of spaces abound due to COVID-19, (broadway was closed just today), and yet somehow we still can think and feel the performed story space - I think. Theater will have to be imagined differently, but as Marike has shown, it already has been. 

Elizabeth Schiffler is pursuing a PhD in Performance Studies at UCLA and practices as a filmmaker and video artist, sifting through the multiple cultural, ecological, and transnational scales at which food and performance interact. She was the inaugural Artist-in-Residence at Seattle's Pacific Science Center.

A work-in-progress presentation of On the Other Side happened at the Skirball Cultural Center on February 21, 2020. A subsequent life is planned, dates TBD.

Marike Splint is a Dutch French-Tunisian theater maker based in Los Angeles, specializing in creating work in public space that explores the relationship between people, places and identity. She serves as a faculty member in the Department of Theater at UCLA.

Right before going to see 74-year old Germain Acogny dance in Olivier Dubois’ “Mon Élue Noire—Sacre #2,” I went to the memorial service for my beloved professor, held at her home. She would have turned 76 that day. First her son read from the Dao De Jing, chapter 11, about the structuring centrality of the void, how the hollowness of a clay vessel provides the function, how the punched-out door and window create a room, about the absence that organizes purpose. Towards the end, her friend, an architect who had built the room we were sitting in, remarked on her complete curiosity, her constant learning, her all-round precision. He rightly marveled at her embracing of so many passions within a single life—classics, architecture, dance, feminist theories, calligraphy, and more. He called her childlike. My mind cross-braided those two remarks, and when I spoke I said that as my Greek professor, she had once told me to listen to the silences, to the blanks, which, of course, is a practical piece of advice for a classicist, but also an immensely philosophical one, and perfectly encapsulates for me her constantly living within a void-shaped unknowing. She lived, much like children in this slant way, as an expert at unknowing. For me, having embarked on a project attending elementary school as a kindergarten student, I have given some thought to what a child’s mind makes possible. I think she was, like a child, an expert at unknowing, at being able to sit with the lack of expertise and still want to learn and know. In the end, everyone attested to her incessant querying, her willingness to revise her point of view, allowing for a life not oriented toward goals but interested in the pursuits, in their delight, in eros, in desire. Her absence allowed us to share her.

Choreographed by a Frenchman and performed by a Senegalese woman, “Mon Élue Noire” was entirely presented within a tall rectangle of a space, created by black scrim, and about as wide as Acogny is tall. That volume was shot through with chiaroscuro, with dark and bright, black and white, in light and paint, each vying for supremacy in a work over-freighted with the history of colonization and haunted evocatively at moments by visual losses. I want to speak to those moments. Those losses resonated in the wake of the memorial service, since the dance itself is a double homage—to Aimé Césaire’s idea that colonizers turn into savages when they treat others thus, and to the pagan source for Stravinsky/Nijinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.”

Moment 1. In the opening moments, featuring a handheld light flickering and extinguishing in one spot and then appearing in another, I catch myself thinking about the movements that take place in darkness. It feels like there is a parallel dance full of action that I am not getting to see in favor of the edited stillness. Soon after, when the harsh strip-lighting outlining the interior edges of the box comes on, the effect repeats. Acogny holds multiple stances in the light, posing like a diva or stony idol, and then when the light goes off, moves into another position in the darkness, only to be revealed motionless by the light again. I have the uncanny feeling that I should be listening to the silences, to the movements in darkness between the frozen poses. The ensuing frenzy shatters that illusion soon enough.

Moment 2. Later, in the dim light, Acogny slowly slices the scrim horizontally, and I expect her to spring free. But it is just her finger tracing that line, in my head converted into the idea that she could escape the cage somehow. Astonishingly her very next move initially negates that anticipated liberation that her action has lodged in my head. Instead of leaping to free herself physically, she takes the black cloth attached to her midsection covering her groin and wraps it over her head, blackness eating her face, while she moves possessed, free and freed in ways any cage would never understand.

Moment 3. The black box is not always well lit, nor is it evenly lit. I see her clearly now though, and then, slowly, she tips her torso and head forward into the front plane of the scrim, slowly moving her face out of the light while her body is fully lit. The headless torso is horrifying.

Moment 4. The box fills with fog, the body is obscured but she is still dancing, moving, shapeshifting. The longing to see the movement is never appeased while the fog spews. The fog relents once though, unfortunately, for another frenzy of movement, and to allow her to paint on whiteface. Then it resumes, the gas chamber keeps on filling, and keeps on leaking out over the audience. It is too clearly and too meaningfully implicating.

Some things are best left to speak in silence.

Neha Choksi is an artist living in Los Angeles and Mumbai.

“Mon Élue Noire--Sacre #2″ was presented by the Center for Art and Performance at UCLA and happened at Kauffman Hall October 5-7, 2018. You can read more about other performances of the work here, here, here and here.

Photos by Neha Choksi and Francois Stemmer.

Written By: Frankie Tyska

Post Date: 3/13/17

On March 4, I went to go see José González perform with The Göteborg String Theory at Royce Hall. I have been a fan of José González for quite some time now, but I had never even heard of The Göteborg String Theory. I’m so glad I went, however, because The Göteborg String Theory added a super interesting and surprising dimension to González ’s acoustic songs.

Most songs began softly, focusing on a certain area of TGST’s instrumentation. Sometimes percussion would bellow, other times violins would swell up. González would enter about a third through the song, piercing the symphony sweetly with his vibrato-less voice. A key focal point of the show was towards the back of the stage - some of the percussion used was very experimental, straying from rhythmic normalcy and traditional instruments. There were occasional solos from different pockets of the orchestra, adding texture to the performance.

Although I thought that I would crave for González to do his songs alone, I actually really loved, and maybe even preferred, TGST’s contribution to his work. They made otherwise simple songs feel intricate and emotionally complex. The extravagance of added instrumentation, however, stripped González’s songs of the intimacy they possessed in his recordings. Despite this step away from his personal emotion, I felt that the orchestra added an element to the songs that made them more personal and applicable to any individual audience member.

González was calm, somewhat shy, and very focused. He rarely made comments and didn’t create much of a connection with the audience. I didn’t dislike this - I’m sure it was a stylistic choice - but I would have really enjoyed learning more about the process he used when collaborating with TGST, or just about him in general. I actually felt more drawn to the conductor, one of the most youthful and energetic I have ever seen, using his whole body to let the beat pulse through him.

The arrangements that were played in the show were dramatic and interesting, but as much as I enjoyed them, I really wish that there was a visual element that would have rounded out the performance. Some sort of set, projection, or light show would have added an element of theatricality and would have made the night at Royce Hall much more of an all-encompassing experience.

I left the hall with the type of elation that usually fills my body after seeing a really good show. Everything except for the past two hours was erased from my mind. I walked home refreshed and really happy. There were some things I may have changed about the show, but I feel this way about most shows, so I would have to give my night at Royce Hall a solid 8 out of 10.

Zakir Hussain: The tabla superstar on ‘The Story of Indian Jazz’ and his new East-West supergroup

There’s probably some Columbus joke to be made about American and European jazz musicians discovering Indian sounds and styles. You know — John Coltrane meeting Ravi Shankar, Miles Davis going modal, John McLaughlin exploring raga styles in his electric Mahavishnu Orchestra and acoustic Shakti. It all opened up the language of jazz in some very exciting ways. Just one thing. Indian musicians had…